Here’s the shocking thing I am learning from having made millions of dollars.
Here’s why money is so attractive to good people, and why making and having a lot of money is such a powerful experience for so many of us.
It’s what money gives us, which I personally experienced for the first time in my life: a true abundance of options and a great sense of safety.
I come from an ancestral legacy of colonization, war, and poverty.
Mind you, there was great dignity in our resilience. And honor in our values, ways of life, and the way we stewarded resources.
But needless to say, a deeply felt sense of physical and spiritual safety, AS WELL AS having access to an overabundance of options, was and is foreign to us.
This is what money bought me and my family. It felt like more than just “it’s sweet having nice things!”
It felt like a cleansing. A medicine. A redeeming. And a sense of coming home.
Because here’s the thing: you don’t have to be Korean to have inherited a legacy informed by theft, violence, trauma, and diasporic displacement.
You can be Indigenous American. Black. Latine. Irish. Jewish. Palestinian. Armenian. Romani. Uighur. Tibetan. The list goes on.
And/or the economic underclass of basically any society.
And/or just NOT a cishetero male.
For us, HAVING a lot of money will, for the first time, and at least briefly, give us that sense of SAFETY AND OPTIONS.
The option to exist.
The option to care for our loved ones abundantly.
The option to do what we like, not what we are forced to do.
The option to make decisions for joy and thriving, not mere survival.
But money was never inherently what gives us these things.
WE HAD THESE THINGS IN THE BEGINNING.
SAFETY AND OPTIONS TO LIVE RICH, JOYFUL, FREE LIVES ARE OUR BIRTHRIGHT.
And for so many of us, money was what allowed us to BUY THEM BACK .
In the past few years, having money allowed me to feel a complete freedom to be my entire self and live out ALL of my values without compromise… for the first time.
The trouble is…
MONEY IS NEITHER THE THING ITSELF, NOR THE SOURCE OF THE THING.
When we mistake money as being THE THING itself, our relationship with money morphs into a different subjugation and bondage.
(I have seen it happen a lot. I know you have, too.)
As a business coach, my highest and most aligned aspiration is NO LONGER giant piles and piles of money for you.
It is now the reclamation of your spiritual birthright.
Your spiritual birthright to an over-abundance of safety — the kind that recodes your nervous system.
To an over-abundance of options and freedom.
To a powerfully felt experience of what your ancestors, too, had, before they were stolen from and subjugated — THE JOY OF ALIVENESS, CREATION AND INTERDEPENDENCE.
For some of you, the journey of reclamation may very well involve making giant piles and piles of money with your business…
…and learning how to steward that wealth in ways that break toxic paradigms and create new ones.
For some of you, it might not.
It might mean just getting you to a place financially where you can easily meet all of your needs, aligned desires and commitments to the ecology that surrounds you…
… and seeing where the spirit of your business wants to take you from there.
The aligned path will differ for each of us.
And it will ask us to wrestle with what it means to reclaim what is ours in a world dominated by cruel, dignity-stealing, earth-depleting systems of supremacy.
It will ask each of us to bring our unique gifts and perspective to the table to be part of the healing.
But I am no longer available to co-sign the falsehood that wealth is the ticket to freedom and aliveness.
Freedom is the ticket to freedom. Aliveness is the ticket to aliveness.
And both are already parts of your soul.
They cannot be purchased. Only claimed and activated.
And it was only ever the legacy of imperialism that ever bamboozled us into thinking that we needed to earn them…
… by making and hoarding millions of dollars through participating in a wounded economic system.
If you’re resonating with what I’m saying, thank you for being here.
We got big work to do together.